The Simple Solution to Crush E-Commerce Ads in 2021 (And Beat iOS14!)

OS 14 is here! Am I panicking? Of course I’m not panicking... I have the perfect solution so your ecommerce store can still crush it. I’m a video marketing expert and I run an e-commerce agency called Guide Social. We have 17 Shark Tank clients, currently and have been going through and trying to figure out how all of our Shark Tank clients can continue to crush it with iOS 14 and there's really one strategy that we've gone back to time and time and time again and we're going to be implementing it for as many of our clients as we can, going forward. If you don't know anything about iOS 14 at all and what the impact is and how it's going to change digital advertising forever, check out this video that explains exactly what this deal is. With iOS 14 retargeting as we know it is basically going to be gone. Retargeting custom visitors to your website, for example in custom audiences on Facebook ads and other ad platforms as well as Google, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, everything; that's just not going to be possible anymore. Considering all that, the one message I want to make clear is that we need to rely on first party data.

What's the Difference Between First Party Data and Third Party Data?

First party data means that you own the information. If you get somebody on your email list, you own that information; that’s first party data. If it is on Facebook servers, like your Facebook pixel, that's third party data; you don't own that data. People come to your site, data is collected and then sent to Facebook and you barely even touch it. Third party data is going out the window, it's going into the trash. Third party cookies are just going to be gone. Now we have got to find better ways to do things. When we're collecting first-party data what I am relying on is a strategy called the pop-up.

The pop-up funnel relies on email and SMS to close the customer at the lower funnel. You have your top of funnel traffic coming in from Facebook ads, Google ads, Pinterest ads, wherever they're coming from. Qualified buyers are brought in with good ad creative using an offer. This offer is super important. This offer has to be what I call a "Godfather offer." An offer that you cannot refuse.

The Godfather Offer

The hard thing is coming up with that godfather offer. This offer really needs to be irresistible. If it's lame like “get 10 percent off” then you are going to see a really low opt-in rate, 2-5% max, and you're not going to be able to move the needle as much and all the traffic gets way more expensive. Making this offer really great is important.

When people click that super clear, godfather ad they are sent to a sort of landing page. The page doesn't matter as much but it needs to have social proof on it, reviews and testimonials. Be clear about the price, the offer, how good the offer, have some risk reversal (a 30 day money back guarantee, etc.) and make it seem like a no-brainer. We are not necessarily assuming we will get a mass amount of purchases but the thing is we can't retarget these people anymore. We don't know who comes to the page because iOS 14 custom audiences are going to be super compromised.

How Does the Pop-Up Funnel Work?

To workaround the absence of retargeting, we are going to collect every visitors email address right off the bat. This is why it's called the pop-up funnel. Cold traffic comes in, they go to the page but they can't do anything on it yet...

BOOM pop-up comes up.

The pop-up is not a newsletter or a discount, the pop-up is a very specific offer and this offer acts as a sales mechanism. I made a video about why you need to have a sales mechanism to get people to buy stuff. The sales mechanism is the pop-up funnel, we've seated the offer in the ad and we move them over to the page pop-up with the offer. They cannot get this offer unless they put in an email address, it's gated. Now you can also follow this up with a contest entry or something similar if they opt in for your SMS list. It’s a two-step process; the pop-up makes an offer they can’t refuse and then they get shuffled over to enter their phone number as well. Once visitors put in their information the page is unlocked and they can do whatever they want. They can look at the testimonial videos, read the testimonials, see the reviews, watch videos, get FOMO from all of these things and buy the product. We’ll take them right through that process. Even if they don't buy, the wonderful thing is we can retarget everybody who is a qualified potential purchaser because they have put in their email address.

Retargeting Using the Pop Up Funnel

There’s a couple things happening here. If you're using something like Klaviyo, Drip or any of these to integrate with Facebook the first thing that happens is they go into a very specific email and/or SMS sequence. If you've got them in a Shopify SMS app or if you're using an app with Wordpress or something like that we can put them into an email sequence that provides scarcity to the Godfather offer; that gets them right into it so they actually take us up on the offer now. If they don't take us up on the offer through email we can also get them on Facebook ads. That's right, Facebook ads. iOS 14 doesn't have to kill everything. Since Klaviyo and Drip or any of these automatically integrate with Facebook advertising custom audiences, we can actually tell it to take this segment of people that opted in for this offer and put them into a special custom audience. Remember, you need to be running enough traffic. You can't usually feed out to audiences on Facebook ads that are just a couple hundred people. You need 800 plus, at least, to be able to get these custom audiences to actually feed out. Now when you set up a retargeting campaign, instead of targeting website visitors you are targeting people that opted in for this offer. Since they had to put in their email to get to the offer and we've made the offer so Godfathery and irresistible, we should have a really nice opt-in right on that form. This audience should get to be a pretty big size just by running traffic to the offer. By doing all this we can run retargeting that keeps the scent of that offer. Meaning we're still talking about the offer, we're providing a little bit of scarcity, we're moving people through this and we're giving a little bit of risk reversal (risk reversal meaning there's no risk, it's risk-free.) All these people are getting retargeted on Facebook and Instagram constantly, they're getting emails every day, they're getting text messages every day; we are retargeting the heck out of them all based on this one sales mechanism. We know exactly where they are and we can meet them where they are in the process of buying this offer. This funnel is extremely powerful and it can really get around a lot of the issues that people are having with iOS 14.

iOS 14 is great for those of you reading this and for those of us who know what we're doing or are working hard to get better at this. Marketing know-how is going to help us win, not tactics, tricks or hacks. I made an iOS 14 video which explains everything about what's going on and a retargeting guide, here.

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